SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 30 September 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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May, Peter
(1951-2026) Scottish journalist, screenwriter and author, active from around 1970; resident in France from around 2000. During the first twenty-five years of his career as a screenwriter, he was involved in something like 1,000 television productions, all seemingly nonfantastic. He began to publish fiction with The Reporter (1978), which he serialized for the BBC; most of his later novels were crime thrillers, including the China Thrillers beginning with ...
Spore
Videogame (2008). Maxis. Designed by Will Wright. Platforms: Mac, Win. / The Panspermia theory formulated by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Svante Arrhenius hypothesizes that life is spread throughout the universe by drifting seeds, or spores. The game of Spore begins with a single cell, deposited in the ocean of an unknown planet by a convenient ...
Rocket Man, The
Film (1954; vt McCluskey Strikes a Blow [original script title]). Panoramic Productions/20th Century Fox Film Corporation. Produced by Leonard Goldstein. Directed by Oscar Rudolph. Written by Lenny Bruce and Jack Henley from a story by George W George and George F Slavin. Cast includes John Agar, Spring Byington, Charles Coburn, Anne Francis, Emory Parnell and George "Foghorn" Winslow. 79 minutes. Black and white. / A comedy with elements of romance and sf. Young Timmy ...
Herrera, Yuri
(1970- ) Mexican political scientist, academic and author, whose first novel, Trabajos del reino (2004; trans Lisa Dillman as Kingdom Cons 2017), unfolds an abstracted crime tale in a moderately surrealized version of the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez, a venue earlier transfigured by Roberto Bolaño into the Santa Teresa of 2666 (2004). His third ...
Richards, Ross
(? - ) US (presumably) author of two Ties of some genre interest: Through the Dark Curtain (1965) as by Desmond Reid for the Guardians sequence about psychic investigators [for Occult Detectives see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]; and The Slave Brain (1967) as by Peter ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book ...